Soho20 Chelsea Gallery is pleased to announce a new exhibition by artist Francine LeClercq.

The painted "Narcissus", attributed to Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio ca 1599, will be the focal image of LeClercq's installation, whereas the erring gaze of Narcissus, the visual echo reverberating between the illusionistic picture plane and the actual gallery setting, the existential reciprocity between the subject and object, form and content, …, are parallel notions and traits that LeClercq uses to investigate the modern context and premise within which a work may be produced, placed and perceived.

" (…) Francine LeClercq is a painter of mostly dripping vacuous fields that although they may address the viewer, or its other, at first glance, there is little to suggest that they are anything but what they seem; what we see in their blunt materiality vacantly looking back are mere peculiarities owed to aspects of their making i.e. the application of medium on canvas, pigmentation, saturation and viscosity, centripetal or centrifugal flow having to do with density of material, centrality and margin, orientation, etc., etc., … And yet it is precisely in the presence of the viewer, to whom they address themselves, that the seeming inward matter of fact-ness of these works begin to contain something much larger than themselves residing outside their material construct, and we realize the primary perception we earlier talked about is a means to a different plane of things, the artist through the work is part curator part choreographer infusing the movements and postures about an arrangement in a specific space, and the viewer in this context is a recruited shape shifter, instantaneously the exempted perceiver, perceived in as it were, the concomitant scenario of a tableau vivant.(…)”

Ali Soltani, Polarities of Perception in the work of Francine LeClercq (excerpt).

Set below the 60 inches standard viewing benchmark, the reference can be said to be Narcissus' lowered gaze, at once, retinal, carnal, and reflective. Flanking a floor installation, two elliptical stretchers, titled Narcissus' Knee (oil and resin on canvas), and Narcissus Reflected (oil on canvas), quietly engage and apprehend the spectator within a voided pool where figuration, movement, image, and reflection are in constant flux between presence and absence.

Francine LeClercq was born in France and received her MFA from the School of Decorative Arts of Strasbourg. She lives and works in New York.